Dead man talking

Page Tools

George Romero has never tired of the zombie film genre
he pioneered, and he swears he never will. Not even when he's dead.
He spoke with Stephanie Bunbury.

Why do so many of us love zombie films? Every evening, fans
throughout the world sit in front of their TVs, giving thanks for
the bounty of the video store as they gaze upon the legions of the
undead. See those zombie limbs flail! Gross out at that pus oozing
from half-rotten carcasses! And hey, check out that exploding head!
It looks like this pizza! Oh my God, REWIND! I GOTTA SEE THAT
AGAIN!

And every now and again, possibly nightly, the fans also give
thanks for George Romero. Romero, who made the seminal Night of
the Living Dead in 1968 and, in succeeding decades, its two
sequels, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, is
generally credited with inventing the zombie-film genre. It is a
genre with its own rules, metaphors, vocabulary and boundaries,
many bizarrely arcane to outsiders. Zombies don't feel - or, at
least, they didn't until Romero made Day of the Dead,
where the zombie subject of a behavioural experiment develops a
fondness for the neurologist trying to teach him to shave. Zombies
also don't talk or run.

This year, Romero has reversed another rule by making one of the
zombies the real hero of his long-awaited fourth film in the
series, Land of the Dead. That's the way it works in the
zombie world: since fans and practitioners watch every zombie film
that comes out, each new film addresses those that have gone
before, tweaking the conventions or quoting the best shots and
ideas in the earlier films they admire. Mostly they quote Romero,
the daddy.

"You know you're a legend," says a journalist to Romero in
Cannes, where selected press were allowed to see 20 minutes of
Land of the Dead. "How does that feel?"

You could say anything to Romero, a rangy 65-year-old dude out
of Pittsburgh who still wears his hair in a grey ponytail, smokes
like a tramp steamer and has clearly never given up on being a '60s
rebel. "I don't get it," he cackles. "You don't think of yourself
that way, do you? I mean, it's great: I go to film schools and
universities and try to encourage people, but I don't know that
anyone today should try to model themselves on anything I did. I
was incredibly lucky."

After art college, George Romero set up a small company in
Pittsburgh that made commercials. Over a sandwich one day, he and a
couple of mates were discussing their frustrations with the
advertising world and, somehow, decided they could start making a
movie if they could find 10 people to put in $US600 each. It was
mad. They had lights and equipment from their office, but they were
still writing the script when they began shooting.

They worked at an abandoned farmhouse, working 20-hour shifts to
save money and sleeping on set, even though it had no running
water. Friends and family would bring them food and everyone they
knew got to play a zombie. Together, they spawned a genre.

"But it was a different time," says Romero. "There were
independent distribution companies then. Today you'd have to shoot
for Sundance or shoot for the moon."

Actually, there had been plenty of films about zombies before
Romero came along. White Zombie (1932) was probably the
first, while classics such as Tourneur's I Walked with a
Zombie (1943) endure as cult favourites. The pre-Romero
zombie, however, was a different kettle of rotten flesh.

The idea of the zombie comes from voodoo religion. In the old
zombie films, a voodoo sorcerer would revive the dead - perhaps
only one dead person - to do his evil bidding, like a Frankenstein
from beyond the grave. In the pantheon of fright films, the zombie
was just another kind of spook.

Romero jettisoned all that supernatural baggage. His zombies
come from nowhere, creatures of unthinking malevolence that act
independently and, most crucially, crave human flesh. There are no
exorcisms and as little explanation as he can get away with: his
zombies simply are. In general, it's the live humans you need to
watch as they bicker and buckle under the pressure of the invasion,
revealing all the weaknesses of late capitalism in action. "That's
what the zombies are to me," says Romero. "An external force. There
is always a group of people at the centre who are fighting their
own battles, and there is this global change going on that nobody
is addressing."

Romero is a great kinetic director who can really spin a yarn; a
couple of minutes into that 20-minute excerpt shown in Cannes,
everyone was hooked and breathless. At least as important to his
films' enduring success, however, is the fact that they are all
political metaphors. The big question in horror is how to keep
shocking people, but it is not a question he ever asks. "I don't
think that way. I would never dream up ideas like that. I start
from the ground up."

From the moment the credits roll across the Stars and Stripes on
a gravestone, there is no question that Night of the Living
Dead is a reflection on Vietnam. It ends bleakly, as Easy
Rider was to do just a year later, with the heroes being killed by
knuckle-brained rednecks. That fatal culture clash reflected the
mood of the time, but it was particularly potent in a horror film,
where convention dictates everything should be set to rights in the
end.

"Horror is radical," Romero told the BBC in a series on horror
broadcast in the '90s. "It can take you into a completely new
world, a new place, and just rattle your cage. But in most cases,
at the end of the story, people try to bring everything back. The
girl gets the guy and everything's fine and people just go on the
way they were. Which is really why we are doing this in the first
pace. We don't want things the way they are, or we wouldn't be
trying to shock you into an alternative place."

Night was followed by Dawn of the Dead (1978), which
ushers in '80s consumerism with a rampage set in a shopping mall,
apparently the target of zombies who feel the tug of a memory of
their lives as shoppers. Day of the Dead (1985) is an
excoriating satire on the Reagan years, in which a bunch of crazed
military strategists - headed by a bull-necked character not unlike
Oliver North - are at loggerheads with the scientists on how to
deal with the zombies outside their shared bunker. We are on the
side of the boffins, for whom the enemy without starts to look like
easy meat compared with the enemy within.

Romero began writing Land of the Dead well before 9/11.
Its starting point was always the idea of a society that was
ignoring its most obvious problems, but while he began by thinking
about social ills - AIDS, homelessness - his focus gradually
switched. "I tried to create a world that represented the new
`normal' in the post-9/11 era."

A powerful administration, headed by Dennis Hopper at his most
sinister, lives in a well-protected tower in the city, while
paramilitary service personnel are banished to a suburban ghetto
from where they must venture out to forage for supplies among the
zombies. "Well," says Romero, "it's easy to take jabs at the Bush
administration".

George Romero has made about a dozen films outside the Dead
series, all frighteners of one sort or another but all built on a
defiant political dissidence and a profound cynicism about the
institutions of family, church and state. His favourite is
Martin (1977), an unusual vampire film in which the
bloodsucker is clearly a neurotic rather than a supernatural being.
But how many of the fans have seen that? It is the Dead
series for which he is revered, even though they are the films he
most doubts. "These films have always been a sort of a platform for
me, but I don't know where to put them. I don't know whether
they're good movies or just me getting off, you know." Even so, he
never tires of his creeping marauders. "Never. They're fun. And
people are so inventive when they come to be zombies. I just tell
them to make their own movies, because if I make any sort of a
gesture, all of a sudden they all do exactly that thing, so you
have to let people invent their own style."

He may be driven by political ideas, but this is the only kind
of vehicle he fancies. He won't, for example, be making a Michael
Moore film any time soon. "It's more fun this way. And it's
something that at least I can do, rather than show my hand and say,
`This is how I think'."

And it is a little easier to get money to make horror, although
perhaps not by much. "People don't trust me yet," he barks in his
old smoker's voice. When will that happen? "I hope never!"

Old rebel Romero, he loves his spot on the margins of
everything; he plans to keep making these films till he dies. "And
then," he adds, twinkling, "maybe I'll come back and make another
one!"